dialogue #16 ‘an other reality’

Adjacent to the world – like ours

Lumion is a rendering package that is accessible, fast and easy to use, becoming commonplace in many architecture, urbanism and landscape offices for its speed and simplicity as a means of communicating design proposals though stills, 360° panoramas and animation. Where many views of potential futures are collaged using rendered scenes with images from a plethora of sources within Photoshop’s layered two-dimensional plane, programmes such as Lumion use clearly defined options and a library of up to 4,395 models which can be arranged in the three-dimensional simulated space of the programme to proclaim a new reality, or represent our own. This three dimensional simulation and its accompanying tools and library is in itself a constructed space with its own logic and limitations. In seeking to quickly communicate clearly and accurately through multiple frames of an animation, or interactive views, we adopt tools that carry their own compromise; material surfaces are optimised for processing speed and the limited catalogues become the language and the content of a proposal. In the pursuit of clarity, representation becomes the selection of an approximation, from a pre-determined, fixed and limited field. Something adjacent to what it was meant to be.

‘Bannerism’

– or how to use pursuasion in the public space. To promote images that seem to depict a better reality or world than real life, mostly done on all kinds of materials, on objects or buildings. As I choose my own moments and cropping in photography, I create a subjective approach on image making. The same tools are used in promoting architectural projects: when a soon to be build housing estate or a public building is announced trough a billboard or a wooden wall around the construction site. We see images of an almost utopian atmosphere where the renderings of the finished project look ‘totally awesome’. The end result can only disappoint.